Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’t fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is…
Category: Scott Fitzgerald
The Phantom of the Jazz Age
The Phantom of the Jazz Age – 100 Years of Gatsby It’s 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. Jay Gatsby has followed the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paris determined to uncover the truth about his identity. Is Scott prepared to tell everybody the truth after all these years? Although a fictional scene,…
The Glorious Fourth – A Writer’s Declaration. A Listenable 10-page storybook
At 10.00am yesterday morning I received an email prompt from Google asking me to check out a new A.I feature called Gemini Storybook. I was busy proofing a book that I am writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, but curious, I took a look. And I’m glad I did. Here’s the result On the morning of…
A ‘Secret Mission’ to Russia. How F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly became a spy.
In 1917, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was nearly recruited for a covert mission to Russia, posing as a Red Cross secretary for Father Sigourney Fay. The mission, tied to US State Department interests during the Russian Revolution, aimed to gauge religious freedom and political shifts. Complicated by secret diplomacy and escalating…
Katharine Gotzian Tighe Fessenden — Proofing Paradise
After quitting his job in New York and returning to his parents’ house in Saint Paul in July 1919, the 23 year-old Scott Fitzgerald was getting down to work on a new version of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, that had a bit more order, and a bit more of a conclusion. On…
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
The first draft of Fitzgerald’s novel would be completed in a villa in Valescure, near St. Raphael in France during the summer and fall of 1924. In the last week of October 1924, Scott, positively glowing with satisfaction, mailed a copy of his novel to his literary agent Harold Ober and his editor Max Perkins…
The Washingtons. The role played by the descendents of the family of George Washington in the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Among the mourners at the funeral of Scott’s grandmother, Cecilia Aston Scott Fitzgerald, in 1924 were the Forrest family, a distinguished Washington family whose ancestral home in Georgetown Cecilia had stayed at during her early years in the capital. The head of the Forrest family was well-known government attorney Randolph Keith Forrest, the nephew of…
Descendents of the Real Jay Gatsby — Alfred A. Stork aka Charles A. Stork I
Pleased to say that after a long search I’ve finally been able to trace the living descendants of Max Stork Gerlach, the man that author F. Scott Fitzgerald used as a partial basis for his most famous character, Jay Gatsby. I have found through them through following the family line of Max’s half-brother Alfred Andrew…
Colwell and Young. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s trip to London, November 1925
In an entry in his ledger dated November 1925 Scott mentions his second trip to London. Like previous entries it is difficult to piece together any kind of meaningful narrative from the handful of names and places he lists and much of our understanding of this trip has been gleaned from supporting diary entries made…
American Dreamer — Listen now at Audible.co.uk. Who was the Real Jay Gatsby?
It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….